Dispatch: Gaza dead wheeled out past diplomats to hospital morgue

As Gaza's leaders edge towards a ceasefire with Israel its ambulances continue
to deliver the dead. Phoebe Greenwood reports.

Displaced Palestinian members of the Balata family, who fled their house, sit in a classroom as they stay at a United Nations-run school in Gaza CityPhoto: REUTERS/Ahmed Jadallah

By Phoebe Greenwood, Gaza City

8:53PM GMT 20 Nov 2012

It was only a matter of minutes after the blaze of a long-range missile flamed through the sky above Gaza City’s Shifa hospital towards Jerusalem that the men responsible for firing it were racing back in through the gates of the hospital.

A crowd of hundreds surged after the first ambulance carrying them as it screamed towards the hospital entrance. Hamas police officers struggled to hold back the hysterical mob to allow medics to pull out the first bodies. The first two men were unidentifiable. Their heads had been blown clear from their bodies, leaving only a bloody stump. The third was intact but frozen rigid, a contorted charred corpse.

As that ambulance hastily left the hospital, sending the crowds scattering, more followed. Seven militants had been hit with a missile fired from an F16 jet as they drove through Gaza City, the first of a tight sequence of explosions that shook within a radius of a few kilometres.

At the Shifa a chorus of mobile phones had struck up, ringing in reports. A crowd that gathered outside a mosque in Zaitoun had been hit. Next was a home on Baghdad Street in Shuja’iyya where more than thirty had been injured, many seriously. The numbers could not be verified.

As the fire from air and naval boats intensified to a near constant barrage, leaflets were dropped warning residents to flee Sheikh Ijlin, Tel al-Hawa, south Rimal, Zeitoun, Shuja’iyya, Turkeman neighbourhoods – areas close to the border used as an entry point for Israeli ground troops in the 2008 war.

“For your safety, you are required to evacuate your residences immediately and move towards the central Gaza city,” the notice warned in Arabic. “In the central Gaza city, you are required to stay between the areas of Salah A-din from the west, Amar Al-Muchtar from the north, Al-Nasser from the east and Al-Quds St. from the south.”

On Tuesday morning Palestinians shoppers, reassured by news of advances in peace negotiations being hammered out across the border in Cairo had joked about their wartime resilience in the street markets. But only hours away from the midnight deadline Islamic Jihad had set for the truce, the Gaza rocked with bombs and was thick with panic.

Journalists had been waiting for several hours in the hospital car park for a briefing from the visiting Turkish foreign minister that would never happen. They were joined by a chaotic hub of men and young boys, rushing towards each ambulance that sped in with shouts of “Allah Uakbar”.

The flow of dead and injured streamed in. Bodies were bundled out – dozens of them, some alive, some dead – from battered mini vans, many charred and most unconscious. Children were carried in by tearful parents. Those who could, walked, blood dripping from their heads and arms Only the torso of one six year-old boy made it to the emergency room.

As the hospital began to fill with the living but critically injured, the dead were wheeled out on stretchers form the front exit, passed the parked diplomatic representatives of the Arab League towards the morgue.

The Hamas leadership, who had previously been milling through the crowd speaking in defiant tones to groups of journalists about the strict terms that Israel must agree to if the violence would end, had disappeared.

Amid the chaos of sirens and bombs, the sound of horns sounded on the street outside followed by a roar of cheering men. Six men accused of collaborating with Israel had been publicly executed. The body of one of them, attached to a motorcycle, was being dragged through the street past the hospital. With no trousers to protect them, his badly damaged legs dangled helplessly behind him.

It was shortly after this that the Hamas prime minister arrived. Illuminated by a beam from a news camera, he clutched the hand of the Turkish foreign minister and raised it in a show of victory to the crowds to a roar of approval. The war was almost over – the Palestinian militants, he claimed, a delivered a decisive blow to the Israeli government who had paid a painful price for their attack on Gaza.

As the politicians toured the hospital wards, the thud from naval ships pounded unseen militants along the Gaza coast, and the city shook. A ceasefire was apparently only hours away but the ambulances continued to deliver the dead.